Tuesday, November 19, 2013

One of a series exploring the current state of Open
Access (OA), the Q&A below is
with Ann Okerson, Senior Advisor
on Electronic Strategies for the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and a former Associate University Librarian at Yale University.
Okerson also serves as a consultant on library projects.

Ann Okerson

Prior to joining Yale, Okerson worked as founding
senior program officer for scholarly communications at the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL) in
Washington, DC, after having written the consultant report Of Making Many Books There is No End: Report on Serial
Prices. Published in 1989, this was one of the early
rallying cries to libraries and academia about the spiralling costs of
scientific journals.

After arriving at Yale, in 1996, Okerson organised the
Northeast Research Libraries Consortium (NERL), a group of 28 large research libraries (and over 80 smaller affiliates)
that negotiates licences for electronic information (i.e. “big deals”) and
engages in other forms of cooperative activity.

In 1997, with funding from the Council on Library and
Information Resources (CLIR), Okerson and
colleagues at Yale library mounted an online educational resource covering the
topic of library licensing of electronic content, in a project called LIBLICENSE. In
addition to web resources and tools, this includes the influential mailing list
liblicense-l, which
today has over 4,200 subscribers, including librarians, publishers and
attorneys.

Describing her current job at CRL in a recent Wiley Exchanges interview,
Okerson said, “I’m engaged with Bernie Reilly (CRL’s dedicated,
creative president) and his senior staff to identify openings and opportunities
for CRL electronic engagement:for
example, playing a supporting role in some digital activities (such as
supporting work for newspaper digitization projects) and a lead role in others
(such as cross-consortial negotiations for significant archival and current
e-resources).”

At CRL Okerson is leading a community working group
tasked with rewriting the “Model Contract” originally pioneered at
LIBLICENSE in the late 1990s. She has also just completed a two-year term as
Chair of the Professional Committee of the International Federation of Library
Associations (IFLA) as well as
four years on its Governing Board.

Harnad’s
message is now viewed as one of the seminal texts of the OA movement, although it
(and the book it led to) was published before the various strands of the
movement had coalesced into a single effort (and adopted the name “open access”)
— which happened in 2001 at the Budapest
Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

Today Okerson is a member of the international
steering committee for SCOAP3, a project designed to transition the principle scientific journals in
the field of high energy physics to an OA business model. SCOAP3 is set
to go live in January 2014.

Given her background, Okerson is well placed to give
an informed view on the current state of Open Access. Inevitably, she views
matters through the eyes of a librarian.

What is striking to me, however, is that — at a time
when many librarians have come to view publishers as the enemy — Okerson
appears surprisingly balanced and objective in her views.

It is no surprise, then, that she views herself as
belonging to the “pragmatic wing” of the OA movement. “I’m always thrilled with
‘better,’ but I also like ‘now’”, she says.

For that reason, she adds, her biggest disappointment is
“the way that the desire for the best can get in the way of the really pretty
darned good. The dialogue that we need to have among academics, librarians,
publishers, and policymakers breaks down when it becomes ideological, and real
opportunities can be missed.”

What in Okerson’s view is the current state of Open
Access? “I remember getting my head around the concept of the asymptote back in
Algebra II, that ideal line the curve is trending towards, closer and closer
without ever absolutely reaching,” she says. “That’s my mental model for how we
are progressing with open access. We’ll likely never get 100% there, but the trend and progress are
real. If we were all a little less ideological, a little more pragmatic, there
would be a variety of things we could be doing now that would advance our
objectives and push the curve closer to the ideal line.”